Recently, I was reading in the book of Hosea and was struck by how the prophet’s words to Israel are so applicable to us and our nation today.

Put the trumpet to your lips!
An eagle is over the house of the LORD
because the people have broken my covenant
and rebelled against my law.

Sound the warning! Devastation is coming, because we as a nation have become lawless. We have made “legal” for use various substances that violate the laws of health. We have rejected the Bible. Our public schools don’t teach biblical truth but a godless worldview. We don’t teach the sanctity of marriage, the covenant relationship that God designed to elevate and protect humanity. We have embraced divorce for any reason, co-habitation without marriage, sexual promiscuity as a rite of passage, and perversity of all kinds.

Israel cries out to me,
“O our God, we acknowledge you!”

We print “In God we trust” on our money and claim God’s blessing upon America.

But Israel has rejected what is good;
an enemy will pursue him.

But we are rejecting what is good, healthy, right, and reasonable, and are pursuing a course that is contrary to health, to the principles of life. We are actively suppressing liberty of conscience, censoring speech, and obstructing religious liberty while advancing narratives that deny reality and destroy reason, such as there is no truth—“your truth is your truth and my truth is my truth”—in which one’s whims, wishes, fantasies, and desires are substituted for truth.

They set up kings without my consent;
they choose princes without my approval.
With their silver and gold
they make idols for themselves
to their own destruction …

Who are the kings and princes of society today? Whom do people spend their money enriching? TV pundits, movie stars, athletes, politicians? Who or what are people worshiping—what are people finding worthy of their time, energy, thoughts, and affections? Entertainment, games, mind-altering substances—anything but actual godliness? Are we choosing leaders who put God first, who apply God’s methods and principles in their own lives? Or do we choose leaders who are godless, who advance a godless agenda contrary to biblical values and principles

And what is happening in society as a result of it embracing godless values? Are we seeing greater maturity, kindness, unity, friendship, development of individual abilities, or are we seeing greater degradation, division, violence, and conflict?

The decay, degradation, and increasing violence in society is no accident, no happenstance; it is the fruit of what we have sown.

They sow the wind
and reap the whirlwind (Hosea 8:1–4, 7 NIV84).

The law of sowing and reaping is: We reap what we sow. If we sow seeds that violate what is true, what is healthy, that is contrary to what is good, that violates the very protocols of life and health that the Creator built into our universe, then we will reap destruction. Paul in Galatians writes, “The one who sows to please his sinful nature, from that nature will reap destruction” (6:8 NIV84).

And what have we sown in this country?

• Godlessness: Generations have now been indoctrinated in our public schools with godless evolution. Their minds have been turned away from our loving Creator to a philosophy of kill or be killed, the survival-of-the-fittest mentality. And godlessness results in devalued human worth. Human beings become nothing more than another step of advancement of biological forces driven by the strongest taking from and exploiting the weakest to survive. And because of the law of worship—by beholding we become changed—people become less caring, less kind, more willing to harm others and take from others.

Neuroscience informs us that when we worship the God of love, we are less fearful and experience less physical and mental illness. But when we reject the God of love, the brain’s fear circuits activate, with subsequent inflammatory cascades in our bodies that cause greater mental and physical health problems. Further, fear causes greater selfishness and willingness to either exploit others or be exploited by others (surrendering of self to powerful people with the hope that one will be safe following them). We have sown godlessness into the minds and hearts of generations, and we are reaping the destructive results.

• Unhealthy lifestyle: Generations have been raised on boxed foods, fast foods, junk foods, and have not been taught the principles of healthy nutrition. We have violated God’s design in food production with GMO foods, chemical fertilizers, pesticides, and industrial meat production with steroid and antibiotic use. We have undervalued physical activity and spent far too many hours sitting, playing video games and watching TV. We have legalized neurotoxic substances and promoted lies that they are harmless. We have exchanged the weekly Sabbath as a time of rest for a time of more work and more entertainment. Over 30 percent of Americans are chronically sleep deprived, which undermines brain function and increases mental and physical health problems. All of this and more has resulted in an obesity and metabolic sickness epidemic (diabetes, high-cholesterol, hypertension, heart disease, and strokes) that negatively impacts the brain, worsening mood, undermining cognitive abilities, and contributing to impulse control problems and violence in society.
• Attacks on traditional marriage and families: Science is clear that the healthiest environments for children are homes with a mother and father who love each other and who parent in mature ways. Healthy homes have parents who do what is right and reasonable because it is right and reasonable, not because it feels good. They get up and go to work even when work is hard because they are willing to sacrifice themselves for the benefit of their families. They teach accountability and, thus, discipline their children in love, teaching a reality-based understanding of the world.

But America has devalued a two-parent home led by a man and a woman joined in marriage as God designed and, instead, blamed other reasons for the decay, such as racial tension. But race doesn’t matter in determining what is healthy for children; God’s design for families does. The Institute for Family Studies found that black children from two-parent homes consistently do better than white children from single parent homes:

• 36% of young black women from intact families graduate from college, compared to just 28% of young white women from single-parent families.
• 14% of young black men from intact families have been incarcerated, compared to 18% of young white men from single-parent families.
• 13% of black children in intact families are poor compared to 33% of white children in single-parent families.

And what has governmental policies and social programs done to families? Do you think this is an accident?

• Assaults on neurodevelopment: We have raised generations on theatrical entertainment (TV and film), often as the primary babysitter. Neuroscience documents that theatrical entertainment alters normal brain development causing under development of the higher cortex (where we reason, think, and self-restrain) and over development of the fear and emotion circuits. This results in people growing up with brains that are more emotional, fearful, impulsive, more prone to anger, violence and less capable of clear thinking, working through emotions, calming self, and self-restraint. And we are reaping what we have sown as society continues to decay.
• Denial of Reality: We have rejected objective truth and raised generations on an ever-increasing mental diet of fantasy, of belief in ideas that directly contradict reality, and this process is today morphed into the grossest and extreme forms of twisted thinking—such as there is no male or female, that gender is something that can be chosen distinct and separate from biological reality, or that transgenderism is not a symptom that something is unhealthy but is a normal alternative to binary sexual identity, or that women can perform just as well as men in combat or other highly intense physically stressful environments, or that men can get pregnant. Or that skin color matters more than character. Or that there is no truth; everybody’s “truth is their truth”; that opinion of certain people is the same as science; or that there is no right or wrong.

It is never good or healthy to deny reality, to advance fantasy, or to destroy critical reasoning skills. What have we reaped in doing so? It is not an accident that we are seeing such decay in our society; it is the fruit of what we have sown.

You can never avoid the truth; you can only delay the day you deal with it. The deniers of truth in this world have sown seeds of destruction, rooted in a godless worldview, and the destructive results are unavoidable.

However, because those advancing such falsehoods don’t value truth, and therefore refuse to acknowledge that the destructive outcomes are evidence that their agenda and philosophy don’t work, they instead find other targets to blame, such as guns in society. But it isn’t merely gun violence that has increased in society, but violence and abuse of all kinds have increased—domestic violence, child abuse, violence with vehicles, knives, riots, theft and organized shoplifting.

We have sown the wind and are reaping the whirlwind.

This decay in society, with its increasing violence, causes more fear, and there are only two ways to resolve this: the godly way and the ungodly way.

The godly way means that we return to God, return to the Bible, actively teaching our children, neighbors, and communities the truth of God’s kingdom in a loving free atmosphere. We actively seek to turn hearts and minds back to God for healing and transformation of the inner person, for as Jesus said, “the kingdom of God is within you” (Luke 17:21). When people embrace God’s love, it casts out all fear and they come to love others and grow in godliness, developing the fruits of the Spirit—including greater self-control—and thereby live healthier lives, and society improves naturally.

Or, we continue down the ungodly road we are on, sowing the seeds of destruction and, on that road, the only way to provide some sense of order, some sense of safety, something to make the fear go down is through external force and control. And we will demand that our governments become ever more controlling, dictatorial, domineering, and abusive—like we see in communist China. We will pass more laws to make us feel safe, and the world will deteriorate into a totalitarian beastly system that Revelation tells us will occur before the second coming of Christ.

This beastly system described in Revelation is not an accident; it is the fruit of sowing the seeds of Satan into the hearts of our children, destroying the image of God in man, corrupting character, increasing chaos and violence until the point that we as a people actually come to believe it is right and good to use coercion and force upon others all in the name of pursuing justice and making us all feel safe.

We have sown the wind and are reaping the whirlwind. But we are not left without hope. Hosea tells us what we must do:

Return, O Israel, to the LORD your God.
Your sins have been your downfall!
Take words with you
and return to the LORD.
Say to him:
“Forgive all our sins
and receive us graciously,
that we may offer the fruit of our lips.
Assyria cannot save us;
we will not mount war-horses.
We will never again say ‘Our gods’
to what our own hands have made,
for in you the fatherless find compassion.”

I will heal their waywardness
and love them freely (Hosea 14:1–4 NIV84).

Our sins, our rebellion against truth, against God, against His kingdom, and against reality itself is our downfall. We will find true healing only by returning to the Lord. Our governments cannot save us; more might, power, police, or enforcement will not save us; the gods of our imagination, our fantasies, cannot save us. But if we return to our Creator, humbly confessing our wrongs, trusting in His goodness and grace, then we will experience His forgiveness, compassion, and healing presence. Jesus will save us if we return to Him. Our only hope is in Jesus.